Advise shared with me from others I talked to or who have responded to my questions about porting.

Please use the forums for general discussions and help on porting issues. Zimbra has disabled the 'issues' section (and other bits) on GitHub, the only 'communication' that takes place on GitHub is a commentary on pull requests (code reviews, etc.). You could also use the Zeta Alliance mailing lists as well - http://www.zetalliance.org/contact .

General Issues with porting for non-official platforms that aren't supported commercially by Zimbra.

1. Posting issues would not be something the Zimbra team would be very active in at this time. They have limited their official platform support based on their QA/Testing resources.

2. Third-party packages :: This is probably the most difficult part since Zimbra currently relies on special builds of certain packages. While they are moving away from Zimbra specific builds, it is an involved process and not likely to be completed soon. To port the current work, one would need to update the "packages" repository (https://github.com/Zimbra/packages) to build for the desired platform.

In the past, it has been said, that this is the only content that needs to be ported to any particular new platform. However, this might not be the case. For example, there are some additional dependencies, like junixsocket (https://github.com/kohlschutter/junixsocket), which would need platform support as well.

3. Zimbra native :: The Zimbra native package would require changes to support the appropriate platform. This package has not been updated in a long time.

Someone had shared, "I have a personal copy of this which I have building on Mac OSX (mostly untested). The changes I had to make were around includes (location of malloc has changed) and a couple of other minor things."

4. Packaging scripts :: Right now, the packaging scripts for the installer make certain assumptions about artifacts produced (for example .so extensions on shared libraries). They would need to be updated.